Feza Tansuğ is Professor of Anthropology and Music in Istanbul and he is one of the leading music experts of Turkey. He was raised and educated in Izmir, graduating from Dokuz Eylül University’s Department of Musicology and the State Conservatory of Music. He studied anthropology and ethnomusicology at the University of Washington in Seattle, and then at the University of Maryland (Baltimore) for his doctoral studies. A past president of the International Association for Turkic Music Studies (Kyrgyzstan) and the Society for Musicology (Turkey), he was the editor of the International Journal of Music in Turkey. He is the author of several books and dozens of scholarly articles on the various traditions of Turkish and Central Asian musics. He has carried out field research primarily in Istanbul on Turkish popular music and culture and in Central Asia. He is the author of Novyi vzgliad na muzyku tiurkskikh narodov Evrazii (New perspectives on the Turkic music of Eurasia). He has been the recipient of numerous fellowships and grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the Social Science Research Council. He previously taught for many years at Yeditepe University in Istanbul and served as chair of the Department of Anthropology. He also taught in Ankara and served as Dean of Faculty of Art and Design and as Director of Conservatory of Music. He has gained a worldwide reputation for his discovery of a Turkish hymn that inspired the famous composer, Ludwig van Beethoven. His current research involves the relations between music and politics, and the question of national identity in contemporary Central Asia.
